Stars of the AVT #24: Julie Atlas Muz
This post is one of a series profiling the hundreds of performers I’ve presented through my American Vaudeville Theatre in celebration of its 15th anniversary. Don’t miss the American Vaudeville Theatre’s 15th Anniversary ExTRAVaganzain the New York International Fringe Festival this August!
We fudge only slightly in celebrating famed choreographer/ burlesque queen Julie Atlas Muz under this rubric. In 2001/ 2002 (it seems to me in retrospect) I was finding interesting ways to integrate the two halves of my theatrical brain (the “legit” half and the “variety” half). During that period I co-presented Orgy of the Dead (adapted from the Ed Wood stag film, which punctuates a narrative framework with stripteases); and Columbia, the Germ of the Ocean (a Weber & Field style burlesque, which we presented at the Bindlestiff Palace of Variety). But during that time we also put on Sea of Love in Soho Think Tank’s Ice Factory at the Ohio Theatre. Inspired by the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, Sea of Love is a 45 minute one act play full of oceanic sex metaphors, which I decided to climax with an elaborate dance of Nereids cast from among New York’s prominent burlesque dancers. Julie was the choreographer. I had just seen her piece “The Thing” at Chashama. It was a dance that involved a wading pool, 7000 pennies, and the audience all wearing raincoats. As someone who, like me, has one foot in “high art” and one foot in show biz, she seemed a natural collaborator. She was a joy to work with cheerful, focused and endlessly creative. The piece was a fantasy involving water nymphs dancing in a giant fish tank. (Our fish tank was gaffed, but Julie would later become famous for an underwater mermaid dance she did every night in a giant fish tank at the Coral Room, a dance she later taught to Kate Winslet for John Torturro’s Romance and Cigarettes).
I ended up having to participate in the dance when a cast member (John Devore) had to bow out to deal with a family emergency, so I have the distinction of having “danced” in one of her pieces (although my part consisted of remaining completely inert). Our only mini-run in: I had initially concieved the segment to be set to the Monkees’ Porpoise Song; she insisted we change it to Phil Philip’s Sea of Love, a song I love for its eerie quality but I felt was a little too campy in light of the eponymous Al Pacino thriller that uses the song to the hilt. But the audience loved her choice, and who am I to argue with them?
In the ensuing years, Julie has gone on to greater glory. She was voted Miss Exotic World in 2006, a title which has also been won in the past by Dirty Martini and Angie Pontani (to name just two that are of interest to local New York audiences.). I caught her in Absinthe at the Spiegeltent when it was at South Street Seaport in ’06 doing two hilarious dances: one in which she finds herself in a giant balloon, another in which she dances with a severed hand. I interviewed Julie along with Nasty Canasta for an Indie Theatre Now podcast in 2007; to hear it, go here. By then, she was an international performer; she had just flown in from a tour of the Far East when we did the interview. This year she winds up her tenth (and final, so they say) season co-hosting the live tv game show This or That with the Great Fredini out at Coney Island USA. She is currently engaged to London-based “Seal Boy” Matt Fraser, with whom she co-stars in The Freak and the Show Girl (which I believe was called Beauty and the Beast in an earlier incarnation, viz, here). Most exciting of all, Julie just starred in the film Tournee with Dirty Martini. Based on a 1912 Collette novel, it won the critics prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival!
To learn more about vaudeville past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
